A fisher’s passion for salmon Hunting the Last Frontier’s four grouse species

from Alaska Sporting Journal - Oct 2020

The Editor’s Note

Upland bird hunting in Alaska doesn’t get any better than chasing grouse. The most ubiquitous of the four species in the state is the spruce. (DICK DANIELS/WIKIMEDIA)

WITH FOUR SPECIES AND LONG SEASONS, GROUSE ARE A GREAT OPTION FOR LAST FRONTIER HUNTERS

BY JIM DICKSON

Alaska is blessed with a large population of grouse, perhaps the noblest of all game birds. Certainly hunting them has long been the sport of kings.

Walking them up behind dogs or walking behind the cover of a well-trained stalking horse has been going on for as long as firearms firing birdshot have been around. This sport has resulted in some of the best hunting dog breeds, notably the English setter.

The grouse is also the reason for the development of the classic best-quality game gun of the British Isles, a 12-bore side-by-side double with a splinter forend and a straight stock that is fitted to the individual shooter’s measurements to 1/16 inch in all directions.

This is the highest form of shotgun development and the easiest of all shotguns to hit with. Thanks to the finest standards of manufacture possible, they are also among the longest lasting, used through many millions of rounds fired through them. It has been said that a young man buys a best-quality gun for his future grandchildren, because they will still be using it long after he is gone.

The traditional grouse load was 1 1/8 ounces of No. 6 shot. But during the World Wars with the resulting scarcity of lead, 1 1/16 ounces was tried. It remains a popular load today.

My favorite load is 1 ounce of No. 6 shot over 3 drams of powder. This gives me absolutely perfect patterns and killing power at all shotgun ranges with virtually no recoil.

I have killed everything from grouse to wild turkey at long range with this load and it has never let me down. The absence of recoil becomes of great importance if

Rued grouse are mainly found in the vast Alaskan Interior, but the state Department of Fish and Game has successfully transplanted some birds to other areas, including the Mat-Su Valley and the Kenai Peninsula. (USER MAD TINMAN/WIKIMEDIA)

you are shooting several hundred rounds a day at a driven game shoot in Scotland, where the birds are raised as a crop and shooters pay to harvest them.

The effects of recoil are cumulative and more than capable of interfering with your shooting after several hundred rounds fired in short order. That’s no place for a magnum. This type of shooting became popular in the 1890s and continues today. It offers some of the fastest and most difficult shooting available anywhere.

While it’s true you get more meat when you shoot a moose or a caribou than when you shoot a little bird. wingshooting has a thrill all its own, and to top it off these birds are a delicacy.

ALASKA’S GROUSE There are four species of grouse in Alaska: spruce, ruffed, sharp-tailed and sooty. While their diets may differ slightly, all grouse share many of the same traits. They do best in areas of new growth after forest fires and/or where logging has cleared out old growth, and thrive on new buds, catkins, leaves and twigs.

In spring the males establish an area and try to attract females for mating. The hens make their nests outside of this area and the males take no part in the incubation of the eggs or raising the chicks. The eggs hatch after about three weeks and the hen and her brood leave the nest and stay together until around the middle of September.

The hatchlings feed themselves on insects and small flowering plants. This affinity for new growth is one reason that walking along logging roads can be so productive. The increased sunlight generates the new growth they love to dine on.

Grouse can be effectively hunted without dogs if you have sharp eyes and ears. If not, you may still succeed because of their tendency to flush at your approach instead of holding tight under cover. They may also hold tight until practically stepped on before making the noisiest flush you ever heard right at your feet if you are not careful.

Sometimes birds may ignore you in certain areas and all you have to do is spot them.

SPRUCE GROUSE The spruce grouse is found throughout Alaska. The brown-tipped tail tells you it’s a spruce and not a ruffie or sharptail. As their name implies, they eat the spruce needles in the winter after the berries, green leaves and flowers of the warm season are gone. This makes a change in the flavor of their meat, but I still like it.

In winter they are often in a snow roost,

Colorful sharp-tailed grouse are a little harder to find than some other grouse species in the state, but they oer some solid hunting in the interior. (RICK BOHN/USFWS)

A staple of Southeast Alaska bird hunting, sooty grouse can get pretty big, providing harvests of plentiful game meat. (WALTER SIEGMUND/WIKIMEDIA) where the insulating properties of the snow keep them warm. Trappers often spot them as they make the rounds of their lines and the birds make a welcome addition to the menu those days.

RUFFED GROUSE The ruffed grouse is found in the Alaskan Interior and the Kenai Peninsula. In the Interior they can be found in the aspen and birch forests of the Yukon, Tanana and Kuskokwim River valleys, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Also in Southeast Alaska, the birds come out of British Columbia along the lower Stikine and Taku Rivers, the agency states.

ADFG reports it transplanted some ruffies to the Matanuska-Susitna Valley and the birds have thrived there, spreading down the Susitna River to Beluga Lake. Another group was transplanted to the northern Kenai Peninsula with more mixed results.

The ruffed grouse likes the hardwood stands that the spruce grouse avoids, so the former offers hunting in areas where the latter doesn’t. A very adaptable species, ruffies are found all the way to the mountains of north Georgia in the Lower 48. The bird comes in both a reddish brown and a gray phase, the latter having better camouflage ability in the snow.

In midwinter these grouse often keep warm in a snow roost. They can be found in the evenings bursting out of the snow to go to the tops of the trees to feed on aspen buds. A good depth of snow for insulation is critical to these birds surviving the extreme cold of the Interior, per ADFG.

SHARP-TAILED GROUSE The sharp-tailed grouse is a relative of the prairie chicken of the Lower 48’s Great Plains. ADFG points out that this is most obvious in their mating behavior, where they court in communal dancing grounds called leks.

There the males do the familiar stylized stiff-legged dance of the prairie chicken as they hoot and rattle their tail feathers in a manner the females find most sexy. Males mate with several females and the females often take more than one mate before leaving to lay her eggs, state biologists report. The frosty silver/gray coloring with white spotted wings and the sharp pointed tail set the sharp-tailed

grouse apart from other species of grouse. In early fall they form flocks and begin to move about as snow starts to accumulate, covering as much as 50 miles in their travels, says ADFG.

While not widespread in Alaska, the area around Tanacross, Tok and Northway, as well as the farmed area east of Delta Junction consistently produce coveys of sharptails, state hunting managers say. They add that smaller populations can be found in the brushlands from Delta Creek to Delta Junction and from Delta Junction to Donnelly Dome.

Near North Pole and Fort Wainwright, marshy areas hold populations of them.

Scattered coveys can be found on the way to Manley Hot Springs, along Johnson Road south of Eielson Air Force Base, and the open ridges west of Livengood, per ADFG. Population density is directly related to whether the land is old-growth forest or new growth from fires or logging, with new growth producing the most grouse, just as it does for other species of grouse.

During winter sharptails feed on dwarf birch catkins while partaking of

grass seeds, waste barley, overwintering grains, kinnikinnick, blueberries, low-bush cranberries, etc., when they can find them, according to ADFG.

Once spring arrives they begin to eat aspen buds and the fresh green vegetation that’s beginning to sprout up. As the insects arrive they are quickly added to the birds’ menu. If there is a good crop of grasshoppers, ADFG says they may feed almost exclusively on these delicacies.

SOOTY GROUSE Also known as blue grouse, sooty grouse are only found in Southeast Alaska, to the south of Yakutat. They are abundant from Haines to Ketchikan and are found close to Juneau and Petersburg as well. The U.S. Forest Service maintains many hiking trails that also provide easy access to them for hunters, ADFG points out.

This is a big grouse, resplendent with a yellow comb atop a slate blue head. Its long black tail is tipped with pale gray colors. Females are about two-thirds the size of males and more brownish. Sooty grouse feed in muskeg and alpine meadows in the warm months. Females with chicks prefer the new growth at the edge of the forest, biologists state.

In mid-March the males begin hooting for females from their perches 75 to 100 feet up in the treetops, giving hunters a golden opportunity to locate them. It’s not quite as easy as it sounds, because the calls have what ADFG calls a “ventriloquist effect” to hide their exact location from predators.

The birds fill up on berries and vegetation in August and September, but switch to a diet of conifer needles in the winter, primarily Sitka spruce and western and mountain hemlock, ADFG says.

A FINE GAME BIRD Except for a portion of Game Management Unit 14 near Anchorage, Alaska grouse season opens in August and stretches through the end of March or April, or midMay, depending on the unit. Bag limits run from five to 15 a day.

Grouse have always been one of my favorite birds to hunt and eat. They can provide a true test of hunting and shooting skill and they taste delicious. What more can you want from a game bird? ASJ

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